Tigress Osborn

Director of the Diversity Center/Diversity Coordinator

email:

tigress@college-prep.org

phone:

(510) 430-2332

fax:

(510) 652-7467

office hours (Monday schedule):

education:

• Bachelor of Arts in Afro-American Studies, Smith College 1996
• Master of Fine Arts in English/Creative Writing, Mills College 2001

department:

• Electives
• The Diversity Center

courses taught:

• Introduction to Women's Studies: Tigress Osborn

 

Guiding Principles for Diversity Work

Each member of an educational community—students, teachers, staff, and parents—must help create a space where people of all backgrounds are welcome and included. Administrators—both those who are specifically dedicated to diversity issues and those in other leadership roles—must demonstrate that diversity is a community priority and must facilitate an environment in which each person is encouraged to take part in making diversity work. The following are factors that I believe to be the most important:

 

• Institutions must be aggressively committed to recruitment of faculty, staff and students who represent diverse backgrounds, with particular attention paid to underrepresented groups. This should be reflected in the organization’s mission statement, admissions policy, and faculty/staff hiring practices.
• Those who understand the needs of underrepresented students have a responsibility to advocate on those students’ behalves; those who do not understand the needs of underrepresented students have a responsibility to make an effort to educate themselves.
•  Specific resources must be allocated for supporting underrepresented students, and students of color and students from other minority backgrounds (low-income students, differently-abled students, GLBTQ students, etc.) should have spaces designed with their unique experiences in mind.
•  A community must work to create an environment in which students are encouraged to share their personal experiences without creating an unfair burden on underrepresented students to be educational tools for others in the community. Faculty need to develop sensitivity about presenting diverse materials. Curriculum must reflect diversity, and campus resources (for example, library materials) should be diverse.
• Diversity in the curriculum and in the community needs to extend beyond the usual suspects. Faculty and staff need to be creative in coming up with diversity strategies. In the classroom, diversity cannot be limited to humanities; exposure to diversity within the curriculum needs to be incorporated across disciplines.
• In teaching underrepresented students what is considered “appropriate” in the academic environment, adults in positions of responsibility have to be careful not to tell students what they should feel but rather to acknowledge what they do feel. Students’ discomfort at adjusting to unfamiliar environments should be validated. This should not be confused with endorsing unhealthy or improper behavior—feelings of confusion, displacement, or overwhelm are not excuses for acting out or giving up. What is important is helping students identify their true feelings about being part of the community and providing them with the appropriate resources for reconciling those feelings with their personal and academic goals.
• Students in the community who come from backgrounds of privilege (white privilege, male privilege, economic privilege, etcetera) need to be given opportunities to learn about the ways in which privilege works in our culture. They should be educated as to ways that their privilege can be used to help ensure educational access and social justice for those from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Adults in the community have a responsibility to assist in this education, and they have a responsibility to educate themselves where they are unfamiliar with the roles various types of privilege play.